LAS VEGAS—Will 2007 be the year that mobile media in the USA finally works?

Music-phones, video-phones, TV-phones—they've all been out for some years now, in kludgey, early-adopter forms. At CES and Macworld this week, though, Verizon, Modeo, Apple, and to a lesser extent, Motorola all showed products that might finally break through and put entertainment and mobile phones together in a way consumers find compelling.

Verizon's and Modeo's mobile TV services deliver TV the way Americans expect it—smooth, multichannel, long-form programming with an easy-to-use program guide and fast channel switching. While three out of the four big cellular carriers have been experimenting with delivering video clips, shows, and sometimes even movies over their data networks, Sprint TV and its ilk have been plagued by slow loading times, confusing rate plans, odd content bundles and the dreaded "buffering" message.

The Verizon and Modeo solutions announced at CES solve those problems, and put their TV signals onto cute, powerful phones. But it remains to be seen whether mobile TV fits Americans' lifestyles, given that you can't watch it while driving a car or anywhere there's no TV signal. Verizon may have a solution later this year when they let customers download programs and watch them from memory cards.

Verizon and Motorola's "Follow Me TV" solution, part of Verizon's FIOS TV system, will make the cell phone just another screen in a multi-room entertainment landscape stretching from the multiplex to the living room and out onto the street. So will Apple's iPhone, which looks like the first music-and-video phone that the average person will actually understand how to put music and video on to. The iPhone may be expensive and limited to Cingular—a miserable bargain that Apple made for unclear reasons—but it will raise the bar, so to speak, for mobile media interfaces. Once it's out on the market, other manufacturers will have to adapt, improve, or get mocked. And Cingular has said that this will only be the first of several iPhones.

A range of actually usable media phones from Apple would be a true revolution on the scale of the Macintosh's introduction of mice and icons to consumers or iTunes teaching people how to download music.

Motorola's deal with Warner Music looks at another missing aspect of the mobile music experience—going beyond just song downloads. Although Motorola's service—which adds liner notes, community links, wallpapers, videos and even paper booklets to downloadable music—probably won't launch in the U.S. anytime soon (it's destined primarily for Asia), it shows they're thinking about what's needed to make the mobile music experience feel like something you can invest in.

New technologies don't mature overnight. The MP3 player waited three years before the iPod stormed the world. The cell phone was an obscure business device for more than a decade before everyone had to have one. Mobile media has been around for a few years now, but 2007 may be the year when finally, your phone and your media come together in happy harmony.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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